With less than a week to go until Freshers, union executives are being forced to deal with issues on Facebook as opposed to Fresher preparations. The union has been faced with minor issues on the social networking site including unofficial fresher t-shirt and unofficial facebook pages.
The Facebook page Loughborough University Freshers Week 2011 and the person profile Loughborough Fresher are both very clear that they are unofficial pages, putting in their basic information; “We are the Unofficial freshers page for Loughborough run by students”.
The union executives are working with the university to “sort it out”. Although it is unclear, what powers the exec and the university will be able to use to monitor the social networking site.
Lucy Padolsey, VP Finance and Communications Services, stated that the executive have “notified the university as the fake pages are bearing their [the Universities] logos and so we are working with them to sort it out”.
She continued:
“We as an exec are determined to make sure that fresher’s receive official and accurate information”
The Faraday Hall Freshers 2011/12 page on Facebook posted on September 20: “Make sure you DON’T join either of these two pages they are FAKE and may try and sell you stuff that you don’t need”.
This warning comes less than 24 hours after an advert was placed on the unofficial page advertising “Official Loughborough Fresher’s T-Shirts”.
These adverts have since been removed and been replaced by an apologetic note stating:
“Apologises for the tshirt listing you may have seen earlier. They were listed in error as they were not cleared by the uni.”
Padolsey told Label Online:
“It is of great importance that we sort this out as soon as possible…With regards to the t shirts, the link was taken down within 24 hours of it going up…to date we are not aware of any Freshers/students losing any money.”
All university halls are being encouraged to have the union tab on their individual Facebook pages to help direct students to the correct pages. And while the Exec are “determined to make sure that fresher’s receive official and accurate information" on such a vast social networking site; that may be easier said than done.
The official Facebook page for Loughborough Student’s Union can be found here.
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